Month: July 2010

He is a young R&B singer who takes his life experience and expresses them in a universal way. He makes music for the fly kids and through it, you might be able to understand how his life is… His name is London. and he’s talking about #Action.

London talks #Action.

We talked for 30 minutes about his rise into the R&B game, his college experience in Atlanta at Morehouse, and returning home to Oakland, California where his latest hit single “Action” has gained much fanfare without much radio play. Now, local radio stations are slowly starting to wake up to London’s movement.

Local radio station 106.1 KMEL recently played “Action” for the first time. I was shaking off a mean cat nap on a Saturday evening, as I groggily checked my twitter timeline: all I saw was #Action.

An overwhelming percentage of my twitter timeline heard the track, and were tweeting the word #Action all over the place.

I had to get to the bottom of it: who is this London guy and what is this “#Action”?

On Saturday July 17th, 2010 I spent the day riding shot gun with the big homies Rod, Reg, and Benardo. The trio rode back to to back through the town in their candy painted Box Chevys… this is how we rolled….

Reg's Ride

We ended up attending the informal Saturday car show at Treasure Island in San Francisco. Mustangs, Camaros, and Old School cars of all kinds were in the building.

Rappers are making it cool to smoke zig-zags again… parents hide your stash!!!

“Jets, fool.” Curre$y says, as the hard working artist from the Big Easy hops on yet another track. J.E.T.S. = Just Enjoy This Shit, And thats exactly what the 28-year old rapper seems to be doing.

The song is either about fast cars, new kicks, weed, or women. plenty of songs about weed and women. the subject matter rarely changes for Curren$y. He has made his brand, and established his following.

For a full bio on Curren$y, click here, but all you need to know is he has a long list of mix tapes. He has been to signed to both No Limit Records and Young Money Records, before signing to Dame Dash’s new label DD172 New York. He had a smash hit single back in 2007, a song called “Where the cash at?” featuring Lil Wayne. And he has done a number of projects worthy of notoriety with Pittsburgh, PA’s own Whiz Kalifa.

The one fun fact that’s not mentioned in his bio, but is a very important tidbit as to who Curren$y is… He’s smokes Zig-Zags! Only! In fact, he and Whiz Kalifa are the only two emcees that I know that openly endorse rolling in “paper planes”…

"Curren$y and Whiz look 4 a roll-up" by Ray."where's the roll-up?" cartoon by Ray.

I found just how big this “paper plane” epidemic was as the California sun was beaming down on the blacktop, I couldn’t hit a J for the life of me. And on top of my jump shot being horrendous, I kept smoking lay-ups. It was an all around unfocused day on the hoop court. I lost a game of 21, and my team lost in the 5-on-5 game. My mind was elsewhere. And my ass was soon on the bleachers, asking, “who got next?”, and with my next breath I got punched in the nose with the odor…

On the far end of the playground bleachers, some fresh High School kids were taking flight: rolling papers. Man, you know long its been since I saw someone roll papers outside? You know how long its been since I’ve seen someone roll papers, period?

I wanted to ask them if they were Curren$y and Whiz fans…But you don’t just walk up to a group of folks smoking weed in the park; the reward of having my question answered was outweighed by the risk of being looked at as a freeloader.

So now, as Curren$y’s new album “Pilot Talk”, flies off the virtual I-tunes and Amazon sales racks, I wonder how strategic of a move it was to push the “JETS” movement? I wonder if Curren$y knew that he was tapping into the crossroads of hip-hop culture and weed smoking culture? And I wonder if he knew putting an old twist on rolling up weed would create a movement within the youth: “JETS, fool.”

On my twenty-first birthday, I rolled out of bed and everything added up: July 6th, 2008 my birthdate, 7+ 6 +08 added up to 21. I realized that every birthday of mines, since the turn of the millennium adds up to the age I was turning… I thought that was pretty cool.

My Dream Cake

This year, as July 6th 2010 falls upon us, I did a little reading about the mathematics behind the age 23. I found some pretty deep things about the number 23; that movie with Jim Carey, and Michael Jordan’s number were just the tip of the iceberg… as I celebrate my mother and father coming together, and donating 23 chromosomes for the 23rd time in my life, CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ARTICLE, and find out some very interesting facts about the number 23.

And after reading that article, check out my man Jordan’s highlight reel, and allow Air-Greatness show you why number 23 means so much to a young African-American man born in 1987…

Now let me get this Jordan year kicked off with a grand slam… a picture that symbolizes good times:

a mad Llama I encountered at a petting Zoo at Oakland’s Jack London Square this weekend…Just because its the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time…

On July 2nd, 2010 I sat down with Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and discussed the possibility of renaming “Fruitvale Station” to “Grant Station”, out of respect for Oscar Grant, the young man who was shot and killed by Bart officer Johannes Mehserle on the Fruitvale Bart Station platform on January 1st, 2009 as many people documented the incident with their camera phones.

(This audio piece and transcript was originally published at NPR.org by youthradio.org)

As part of NPR’s continuing coverage of the Oscar Grant trial, Youth Radio brings us this audio postcard — not from Los Angeles where the trial is happening, but from Oakland where the case began New Year’s Day in 2009. That’s when then-BART Transit officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed an unarmed 22-year-old man. Last year, the city erupted with angry protests, some of them violent. And now that the officer’s trial is nearing a close in Los Angeles, Youth Radio’s Pendarvis Harshaw, an Oakland resident, traveled to three distinct spots throughout the city to ask how people are feeling about the case.